GRAIL Mission Expected to Launch a Year From Today

The exploration of the Moon is something that all Global Citizens should get behind. In the long-run, the future of humanity is to be found in space, and establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon is a necessary step in that great project. The Apollo Program, despite its Cold War context, represents one of the great achievements in world history, just as the failure to properly follow it up will be remembered as one of the great failures in human history.

Although current plans to return astronauts to the Moon have run into roadblocks in Washington, we can hope that there will again be a permanent human presence on the Moon within the next few decades. Before that happens, of course, the Moon needs to be subjected to an intense exploratory effort by unmanned spacecraft, in order to pave the way for future human expeditions.

The international community has stepped up to the plate in this regard, launching an unpredicted multinational effort of lunar exploration that has, unfortunately, been all but ignored by the global media. In just the last few years, the Moon has been visited by a veritable armada of orbiting spacecraft from the United States, the European Space Agency, Japan, China, and India, which have been accumulating scientific data that will keep the world's scientists busy for decades to come. And we are only just getting started.

The next major lunar exploration project will be the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, scheduled to lift off one year from today. Part of NASA's highly successful Discovery program of smaller, less expensive projects, the GRAIL mission is designed to place two small spacecraft in orbit around the moon, using the Doppler shifts detected in radio waves passing between them and detectors on Earth to create a full "gravity map" of the Moon. This will allow scientists to gather unpredicted amounts of information about the Moon's interior, helping to answer questions scientists have been asking for decades.

We live in an age of severe budgetary pressures among nearly all nations of the world, so there will always be those who question whether resources should be expended on scientific enterprises like the GRAIL project. But these questions would be better directed towards the massive military budgets or the bloated bureaucracies of the various nations. The scientific enterprise is one of the things which makes us human, and it deserves full support.

Below is a video showing how the GRAIL mission will work. There's no vocal narration, but you're smart enough to figure it out.